


There Will Be An Answer

by Raven2547



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: Blood, Gen, Guns, Russian Roulette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-17
Updated: 2014-09-17
Packaged: 2018-02-17 18:16:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2318774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Raven2547/pseuds/Raven2547
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wherein the team is captured and Peter is a hero in his own right, but also a gambler.</p>
            </blockquote>





	There Will Be An Answer

**Author's Note:**

> Fill for kink meme prompt here: http://guardian-kink.livejournal.com/1806.html?thread=924942#t924942

Gamora's hands were shaking, she could admit. The cold wall of the cell pressed against her back while her wrists held her limply from the higher attachments. Rocket, fifteen feet across the room, sat in a cage just tall enough for him to sit down comfortably, brushing his head against the top. His hands were taped to his feet, the fur probably getting horribly stuck together. 

Drax and Groot, now fully grown, were fully immobilized in their respective cells. A chain-metal like material wove like a straight jacket around Drax's bulky frame and connected him to the walls by various chains to reduce movement. Groot buried--yes, buried--nearly entirely in the ground. Only his head poked out, and it sat just to the left of Gamora's cell. 

The team had foolishly been captured on a routine mission of search and destroy. All but Peter, of whom Gamora's last memory of was slamming into a cliff side and lying motionless on the ground, had been taken captive. They had to have imprisoned them in these contraptions whilst the Guardians were unconscious, because this was ridiculous. 

In spite of their seeming total vulnerability, Gamora's only worry was for Peter's welfare. Leaving him in such a fragile state destroyed her inside. As their captain and dear friend, Peter was a treasured member of the team and Gamora could tell that the others also feared for his life. 

If they somehow managed to get out of this--Peter limping his way to the Nova Corps and demanding, in that extremely haughty way he was wont to use, that they rescue his team or some other miracle--then the former assassin had already decided they would be taking a hiatus. A long one.

Their captor (or jailer, depending on your viewpoint) was sitting at a small card table in the middle of the room. His chair and table were set upon a rotating circle in the floor that spun so slowly, but fast enough he had a view of each of the Guardians at regular intervals without moving himself. This didn't matter though, because he was busy rifling through a beat up deck of cards.

A commotion roused the guard from his activities. Outside the door, in what Gamora assumed to be a hallway or entryway of some sort, the sound of gunfire and unmistakeable sound of a body hitting the door filled the cell room. 

The guard already had his firearm ready and was backing himself into the wall that housed Groot's disembodied head when the door was calmly opened from the outside. Peter, in all his Ravager glory, stepped in with his hands up, that stupid, ridiculous chagrined smile on his face like all of this was him admitting to taking the last Xindi bar out of the cabinet. 

Three shots embedded themselves into the wall panel next to him, and he frowned at the guard like he was a disobedient child. The gun, embarrassingly inhumane on this backwater planet, still used metal bullet cartridges and powder ignited in the barrel. The guard spun a part of it and another locked in place.

"Hey hey hey, I just wanna negotiate! I don't even have a gun, see?" Peter waved his hands in the air, wiggling the fingers. 

"I don't negotiate! Get back or I'll shoot the tree!" the boy tapped Groot's head with the toe of his boot and Gamora heard Rocket grown menacingly. 

"No need to be hasty, buddy," Peter said, moving the rest of the way into the room and pushed himself away from the wall a little, "You've got a couple of my things here, and I'm here to collect."

"I don't negotiate, didn't you hear?! And I'm the one with the g-gun, so you can just go back out the door!" The guard sounded terrified by this madman in his doorway like a crazed loan shark.

"Who said I didn't have a gun?" two more shots missed, this time at Peter's feet in an unmistakable warning shot.

"I said leave!"

Peter's eyes roved around the room, darting from everyone's faces to the table in the middle. Specifically on the cards.

"...Are you a betting man, sir?" he said chillingly calm. The question caught the man off guard and he sputtered for a second before ferociously shaking his head.

"I am not! Those are just for free time. Stop trying to distract me and get out!"

Peter smiled his most winning smile, and if Gamora hadn't already been chained to the wall she would have punched him in his stupid mouth. 

"Do you think you could beat me in a game for their lives?" The guard's eyes gleamed, and Gamora already knew that he was a card shark, at least, with a grin like that. His wolfish smile stretched his thin face into a garish representation of his species' facial traits. His whole demeanor screamed 'bad idea'.

"I'm confident you lose that bet every time," he said, lowering his arm a little. Peter nodded to himself.

"Alright, let's make a wager then," he said, stepping a little farther into the room. 

"I pick the game, and the winner gets to keep the prisoners, the loser..."

"...dies?" the guard finished lamely, stepping forwards as well, a predatory look in the reptilian eyes.

"Sure! so the stakes are set, eh? What do you say?" Peter stretched out his hand and, after hesitating a second, the guard reached out and took it, shaking twice firmly. A little known fact about his species, Gamora remembered, was that they were honor bound to complete any oath they swore to, and shaken agreements were especially treasured. He placed his gun on the table, trustingly, the idiot, and gestured to Quill to take the adjacent seat.

Once seated, he said, "Name your game, Terran, and we will settle this."

"Well, I like to play a little game that reminds me of my home," Quill began, "and on Terra it's called 'Russian Roulette'..."

The guard's face was slackened in incomprehension, so Peter elaborated, "I've also heard it called 'Xandarian Scatterbrain' or 'Laser Kaiser'?"

The guards face went from comprehension to rage in under five seconds, fast even for Peter's annoyingness to catch on, "You said we would play a card game!"

Starlord smiled coyly, "I said we'd play a game. You just assumed I meant a card game," he chuckled to himself, no doubt at the cleverness of his plan--which was ridiculous and awful and not even eleven percent.

After some huffs and puffs for several minutes from the guard, along with choice words for cheaters and hustlers, the guard asked for the rules of the game.

"Well," Peter started, "basically I take your gun," he did so, sliding the one remaining bullet out of the chamber and then right back in, spinning the chamber wildly and laying it back on the table. The guard was looking decidedly queasy, and Gamora was starting to understand what 'game' Peter had decided on.

"And now, we take turns pulling the trigger. I'll let you decide who goes first, and who we point it at."

"Who we uh," the man gulped, "point... at?"

"Well yeah, each other or ourselv--"

"Each other!" The guard said, panicked. His hands were shaking. Sweat glistened on his brow, but his dark glasses covered his wide eyes. 

Like a cat, Quill's smile stretched from cheek to cheek. If Gamora hadn't known better she'd say he was thrilled to be playing this game.

"Who goes first then?"

"You can!"

Peter picked up the gun. Gamora's vocal chords had tied themselves together as soon as he'd come in the door. She couldn't say why the others were quiet, but she was just out of sheer terror for her friend. He was suicidal! This game could not be won, only survived. When Nebula had asked her to play a Terran game called 'mumble-de-peg', and after Gamora'd won, she'd decided that all Terran games were warped and centered around their own mortality. How crude to play fun and games with loaded weapons and chance.

Star Lord pointed the gun directly under his chin toward his face and pulled the trigger. An empty click was heard and the sigh of relief throughout the room was felt more than heard. The guard, more terrified than before, picked up the fun and quickly pointed it at his temple. It clicked emptily in his hand. He nearly threw it back to Peter.

"Star Lord! Cease your imbecilic acts of self destruction immediately!" Drax's voice rang out just as Peter picked up the gun and pointed at himself. For once in this whole endeavor, the pirate's smile disappeared and he looked at Drax before pointing and shooting the--now noticeably empty--chamber into the same spot on his skull and passing it back to the quaking guard.

"I have to, bud. We're getting out of here real quick, that's for sure--"

The guard, visibly panting and sweating so profoundly that it was dripping onto the table, flinched away from the firearm and pushed his chair out. He wildly kicked at the table and, though he never made a move to grab the gun and turn on Peter. He gripped his hair under his helmet with white knuckled hands, and Gamora knew then that he would be lucky not to asphyxiate on his own saliva.

Peter, to the contrary, was staring around the room boredly. He had leaned the chair up onto its back legs and was balanced backward with his feet crossed on the table. In short, he was the picture of childhood boredom and contentment. 

"Hurry up, buddy, we've only got three more shots to g--" but the man had already madly grabbed the gun and fired into his head. A shot not unlike that of a tiny cannon went off in the tiny room and all the captives flinched. When Gamora finally summoned the courage to look--which was ridiculous, she was a trained assassin and the site of yet another dead body shouldn't have been shocking--a thick spray of orange-brown blood was splattered over the floor and the part of the wall the guard had been pacing in front of. His body, now still and growing cold, the sweat drying rapidly, lay in a crumpled heap on the ground.

Keys that she hadn't noticed before now clanged loudly in the suddenly deadly quiet room as Peter knelt to pick them up. He grinned at everyone and started to unlock their cells just as light came in from small slats in the air vent to the outside world and the unmistakable sound of Nova aircraft swept in.


End file.
